Jian Gao

Jian Gao, Jin Liu, Shunping Ji

Satellite multi-view stereo (MVS) imagery is particularly suited for large-scale Earth surface reconstruction. Differing from the perspective camera model (pin-hole model) that is commonly used for close-range and aerial cameras, the cubic rational polynomial camera (RPC) model is the mainstream model for push-broom linear-array satellite cameras. However, the homography warping used in the prevailing learning based MVS methods is only applicable to pin-hole cameras. In order to apply the SOTA learning based MVS technology to the satellite MVS task for large-scale Earth surface reconstruction, RPC warping should be considered. In this work, we propose, for the first time, a rigorous RPC warping module. The rational polynomial coefficients are recorded as a tensor, and the RPC warping is formulated as a series of tensor transformations. Based on the RPC warping, we propose the deep learning based satellite MVS (SatMVS) framework for large-scale and wide depth range Earth surface reconstruction. We also introduce a large-scale satellite image dataset consisting of 519 5120${\times}$5120 images, which we call the TLC SatMVS dataset. The satellite images were acquired from a three-line camera (TLC) that catches triple-view images simultaneously, forming a valuable supplement to the existing open-source WorldView-3 datasets with single-scanline images. Experiments show that the proposed RPC warping module and the SatMVS framework can achieve a superior reconstruction accuracy compared to the pin-hole fitting method and conventional MVS methods. Code and data are available at https://github.com/WHU-GPCV/SatMVS.

Caijun Ren, Xiangyu Wang, Jian Gao et al.

Detecting changed regions in paired satellite images plays a key role in many remote sensing applications. The evolution of recent techniques could provide satellite images with very high spatial resolution (VHR) but made it challenging to apply image coregistration, and many change detection methods are dependent on its accuracy.Two images of the same scene taken at different time or from different angle would introduce unregistered objects and the existence of both unregistered areas and actual changed areas would lower the performance of many change detection algorithms in unsupervised condition.To alleviate the effect of unregistered objects in the paired images, we propose a novel change detection framework utilizing a special neural network architecture -- Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to generate many better coregistered images. In this paper, we show that GAN model can be trained upon a pair of images through using the proposed expanding strategy to create a training set and optimizing designed objective functions. The optimized GAN model would produce better coregistered images where changes can be easily spotted and then the change map can be presented through a comparison strategy using these generated images explicitly.Compared to other deep learning-based methods, our method is less sensitive to the problem of unregistered images and makes most of the deep learning structure.Experimental results on synthetic images and real data with many different scenes could demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.